Say what you will of me, I love Microsoft Excel. I don’t think my life as a system administrator would be as easy without it. Basically, I love it for Autofill in combination with it’s text functions, and also for charting.
There are three things I’d love to see Excel do better, in these regards:
- I wish Autofill recognized IP addresses. It will increment them now as numbers, but when I get to x.y.z.256 I have to start over. Not a huge deal, just would be nice to see it say “Hey, this is an IP” and do x.y.z+1.0 or something.
- I wish Excel in general, and Autofill in particular, could handle hexadecimal numbers. And along with #1, IPv6 addresses would be cool.
- I wish the charts had color scheme options that accommodated people with color blindness. 25% of the people in my group have some form of color blindness. I’d love a series of checkboxes where I could indicate the types of color blindness I’m dealing with (total color blindness, red-green, or blue-yellow) and have it choose better colors.
That’s all. Maybe I’ll see if there’s a way to submit these directly to Microsoft.
Update: I love blogs… Mark Bower has the link in a post, first hit in Google.
I agree – Excel should really be able to handle autofilling of hex, oct, and bin numbers. This would be of great help to me as well, particularly the ability to autofill hex numbers.